September 2005 issue

Hi, and welcome to the third issue of our watchDirectory announcements
newsletter.

Development corner

Since the previous newsletter we released a new Plugin (1, 2, 3... that
will be number 10) to automatically unzip files as they arrive. Also, a
few additional options are added to the automatically run .bat files
plugin, and GIF support to the thumbnail plugin

The Control Center now actually obeys your "check for updates"
preference, older versions ignored it when the computer you run the
Control Center on had an internet connection. The latest version of the
Control Center also has some new menu options to start/stop the wdPostMan
program.
Furthermore, the actual monitoring program (wdRun) now handles "sharing
violations" (a file or directory is locked by someone else) better.

Make sure you are running the latest version: Help -> Check for Updates.

Our aim is to release a new watchDirectory plugin each month, and improve
the existing plugins as needed/requested.
Plans for the month of September:

A new plugin to "AutoSort" files to different directories based on their
names (*.jpg to d:\pictures, John*.doc to d:\John\Doc).

The German, and maybe the Dutch, translation of watchDirectory should
be ready.

Tip of the month: chaining tasks

The current version of watchDirectory doesn't allow you to run 2 plugins
for one monitoring task. For example, if you want to ZIP the new file
before you email it, you may want to configure the Email plugin
and
the automatically Zip plugin.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to configure 2 different tasks:

One will monitor the "actual" directory where the new files are created.
This task will run the "Automatically ZIP" plugin and write its ZIP files
to another directory (C:\Zipped).

The other task monitors the "output directory" of the ZIP plugin, and
emails those ZIP files.

You can also add a third task that will "automatically delete" the ZIP files
after 30 minutes, by using the scheduler of the Professional edition.

The tools WE use

If you visited the www.watchdirectory.net website recently, you may have
encountered a few strange looking pages, or even "missing pages" and
pictures. Now I know I *should* be checking my website logs and html to
prevent these kind of errors, but priorities (and the lack of 223 hours
in a day - sounds familiar?) prevented me from doing that.

A guy I know who eats HTML for breakfast helped me out recently, and
also has an online HTML checker
that you can enter the URL of your own website.
So go ahead and enter your website's URL and see what happens.

Until the end of September 2005, you can order the standard or even
more powerful professional edition of HTMLValidator and save a little
(20%). Just order it from
http://store.eSellerate.net/s.asp?s=STR114898436&coupon=<<<only for subscribers>>>

My 5 minutes of fame (please skip)

Besides watchDirectory, which is developed with the programming language
C++, I do a lot of custom development using the Java language. Still not
sure which of those languages I like better, however as several
customers requested other "scripting languages" than batch files, it
seems natural to me to have a Java plugin. Other scripting languages, like
PHP and Perl are also "on the horizon", but are lower priority (as I don't
"speak" PHP or Pearl - time, time, time...).
You can expect the Java plugin somewhere by the end of this year.

Customer testimonial
Watchdirectory has saved dictationstore.com, Inc. thousands of dollars in development costs.
We needed a way to provide multiple automated back-end processes for each one of our customers. When we looked at the costs to code these processes into our applications it was outrageous - and what if the customer needed something changed?Complete testimonial

Automatically UNZIP new zip files
Monitor a directory for new ZIP archives and automatically uncompress them.More

Automatically ZIP new files
Monitor a direcrory and compress new and changed files to industry standard ZIP files.More

Monitor the size of your folders
Automatically delete (or move) files from the monitored directory when it is filling up. Allow a maximum of X files or megabytes, and watchDirectory will (re)move the oldest.More

Upload your files to an FTP server automatically!
Detect new and changed files, and upload them to your FTP server. Supports all popular (secure) FTP protocols!More